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Around mid-day Friday when dozens of people started streaming into the Potomac Ballroom at CPAC, I assumed that it was in anticipation of Rand Paul’s speech. There are always a lot of young Republicans/Libertarians at CPAC and they love the Pauls. But what I was witnessing possibly, was the arrival of the Bush Brigades.

It sounds like Jeb Bush’s supporters are taking CPAC pretty seriously this year. Emails provided to Slate show that backers of the former Florida governor are busing supporters from downtown Washington D.C. to CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland, and organizing to get them day passes into the event.

One of the emails that went out this morning was from Fritz Brogan, a former advance man for then-President George W. Bush who (per the Washington Post) co-hosted a fundraiser for Jeb’s Right to Rise PAC earlier this month. A Bush insider confirmed to Slate that Bush’s Right to Rise PAC is helping organize the transportation.

“We strongly recommend arriving as early as possible to get a seat,” wrote Brogan in an email sent to undisclosed recipients. “Our ‘Early Rise’ team will be there at 7:30am onward helping reserve seats- if you want to join the early team, let me know.”

During Sean Hannity’s talk, Friday morning, he conducted an impromptu straw poll by calling out the names of all of the candidates, and encouraging their supporters to applaud. Judging from the huge ovation Rand Paul received, he was the top choice. Scott Walker came in a close second. But the names Chris Christie and Jeb Bush when called out by Hannity, inspired nothing but loud boos.

By Jeb Bush’s speech at around 2:00 in the afternoon, the room had filled with Jeb Bush supporters and had been transformed into a pro-Bush venue.

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Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism expert who teaches at the National Defense University, spoke convincingly on the threats posed by the Islamic State at a CPAC panel, Friday called, “Lowering the Boom, When to Stand Up To Rogue Nations. Also on the panel, were Andy McCArthy, former Asst. US Attorney, Peter Brookes, the Heritage Foundation, and Gary Johnson, the libertarian former governor of NM who was on hand to offer his counter points.

“ISIS now holds territory in excess of the landmass of Great Britain. That means, it is not just a terrorist group with training camps,” Gorka explained. “It is a proto-state.”

He continued that ISIS is the “richest threat group in modern history” after robbing the Iraqi national bank twice and getting away with $823 million dollars.

Dr. Gorka noted that according to the 9/11 report, the entire cost of that terror event cost al Qaeda $500,000.

“That means ISIS has enough money from those two raids for 1,600 9/11s should it wish to turn its guns against us,” he warned. “And that is without the $3 million dollars it makes per day in illicit oil sales.”

Gorka said, ISIS is the most successful Jihadist terrorist group in terms of recruitment.

“The recruitment power of ISIS is staggering. They have recruited 14,000 foreign fighters,” he said pointing out that by foreign he means, “Brits, Australians, Americans and Germans.”

Gorka said ISIS understands social media in a way that al Qaeda never did, and recommended that every tax payer and every lover of Democracy watch their videos in their entirety.

“When you see another human being take seven minutes to sever another man’s head because he was a Christian, then you’ll understand the nature of the war we are in.”

There have been over a million Christians killed our hounded out of Iraq since 2003 when there were one million, 400 thousand Christians in Iraq. There are now less than 200,000 left. “That is a genocide against Christians on our watch,” he said.

He went on to note that we are at war with a global jihadist movement that will take generations to win. And it won’t be won without US involvement.

“Isolation and non intervention will not stop a 9/11 ISIS attack,” Gorka concluded.

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Former pediatric neurosurgeon and possible 2016 presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson kicked off CPAC 2015 with a speech calling for end to government dependency.

“We need to understand what true compassion is to reach out to individuals who think that being dependent is reasonable as long as they feel safe,” Carson said. “It’s not compassion to pat them on the head and say ‘there, there, I’m going to take care of all your needs, your healthcare, your food.’ That’s the opposite of compassion.”

“I’m not interested in getting rid of a safety net, I’m interested in getting rid of dependency.” Carson said to much applause.

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Conservative activists have been working overtime to stop the proposed IRS regulation for 501 (C) (4) social welfare groups that is designed to silence conservatives. The new regulation “popped up” without prior notice on Thanksgiving weekend, last year, when most of America was focused on the holidays, giving them only two months to act. In the end, over 140,000 comments were posted on regulations.gov by the deadline of Feb 27. This means the IRS has to comb through and address every single one of them, comment by comment. They have gummed up the works for the IRS on this rule change in a huge way.

As Langer would tell us, “my dream has always been… to slow down the wheels of the bureaucracy – bury them under an avalanche of comments – that we can now do.”

Andrew Langer: “Congress passes a law, and it goes to the agencies for interpretation through the regulatory process, and you file substantive comments – comments that get to the heart of the rule, and why it’s bad. But you also need to get grassroots comments in. This is what the left has always done very well. It’s how weird interpretations of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, OSHA rules – how those all move forward, is because they all go out – the Sierra Club will go out and get tens of thousands of postcard comments. So we knew we had to do the same thing with this.”

Ralph Reed: “We feel strongly about this because we think that one of the things that separate the United States from every other nation in recorded history until the time of our founding – the thing that makes us unique and exceptional, and it’s the reason why people are willing to crawl across broken glass and cross oceans at the risk of their own lives to become Americans – is because we believe the government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. And if you don’t think that is different than what goes on in the rest of the world, just look at Syria where there’s over 140,000 innocents that have been slaughtered recently, look at what’s going on in the Ukraine and Crimea, look at what’s happening in Egypt, in Iran and I can go on. What happens here – is not normal. It is not the normative human experience. Now, the right to organize – to mobilize, to educate, to register people to vote, to ensure that they’re properly activated – that they have an effective means of petitioning their elected officials – is critical to this Democratic experiment.”

Phil Kerpin: “Elected Democrats are behind this…they think the only way they can survive is to shut us all up. They’re willing to throw their own grassroots overboard and the First Amendment of the Constitution to do it, and given the fact that the IRS has already taken it as far as they have, in the face of all the opposition across the ideological spectrum, I think it’s very likely that they’ll take the next step and attempt to finalize the rule before the election. If they do that, I’m not going to abide by the rule. I think it’s an illegal rule and we’re going to litigate it..”

These conservative men may look like mild mannered milquetoasts but they are warriors who are doing God’s work. We should support their organizations in any way we can.

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You may or may not have heard about a controversy sparked by Ann Coulter, last Saturday during CPAC. During a bloggers briefing held by the Eagle Forum on immigration reform, Ann made a rape analogy that caused some outrageous outrage on the left and caused consternation on the right:

“This isn’t natural. You have, especially on places like my favorite network, for humor, is MSNBC — and you know, they’re smearing, ‘Oh, Republicans just have to get used to it, the country is changing.’ No, this isn’t a natural process. It’s like you’re being raped and the guy is telling you, ‘Sorry, my penis is in you. Nothing you can do about it. No, you’re raping me!’”

Conservative blogger Marooned in Marinbelieves the “obscene comment” overshadowed the briefing. I think he’s right, and wonder if perhaps it was by design. Coulter sometimes cranks her comments up a few amps when she feels like an issue is getting overshadowed by left wing propaganda. She is often outrageously outrageous by design. If you watch all the videos I took at the briefing, you’ll note how frustrated she was that even Fox news often gets the facts wrong, falling into the default PC liberal narrative. The conservative argument against amnesty is given short shrift by the media. Enter Ann Coulter drawing attention to a conservative argument as only she can.